Scenes from the aftermath in Oakland:stories of victims, survivors and healers.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Trauma Cache, Part 2: Oakland's Moneyball Approach to Public Safety

Castro Street, West Oakland

There are plenty of veterans of Oakland’s troubles -- survivors of assaults, survivors of the killed, formerly-incarcerated Oaklanders making amends -- out there addressing our abundant, sometimes hidden hoards of trauma. (See Trauma Cache,Part 1: The Calendar and the Killing.)

Some are with city government, others work out of nonprofit organizations dedicated to violence prevention and supported in part by Measure Y, the city program approved by a public vote, which funds anti-violence efforts among Oakland’s youth.

In Oakland, even as the dark urge wins battle after battle, the number of police officers continues to diminish, down now from just over 800 in early 2010 to fewer than 700 today.

And so, as I heard Police Chief Batts say at a fundraiser early this year, the work of non-violence organizations to inject the idea of peace into a community accustomed to violence has become more crucial than ever, more crucial than planned. Meant to supplement, to complement police work, meant to lay a seed of peace for the future, the non-violence programs, whether they know it or not, whether they want it or not, are taking on a far more urgent role in protecting Oakland than originally envisioned.

Leaning house, West Oakland

Because they are undervalued, because they are accustomed to supporting themselves through fundraising, because they have lower overhead than a police department, and because the salaries of non-profit workers are far lower than police officers, broke Oakland can afford to support non-violence organizations.

Moneyball, as most who read this will probably know, is a term used to describe the Oakland A’s method (emulated by a few similar organizations) of fielding a competitive team despite its own penurious (think: Scrooge) ownership and despite the need to beat rival teams willing and able to pay unimaginable salaries to numerous superstar players.

Theoretically, in addition to finding and developing its own younger, and therefore cheaper, talented pitchers and position players, the A’s seek out “undervalued” veterans: seemingly mediocre players with particular, undervalued skills; good athletes with a history of injury whom they gamble will finally stay healthy for an entire season; or superstars at the ends of their careers who might have one good or great season left (see Frank Thomas). All this in the hopes that some combination of these affordable, undervalued players will become a winning team.

To an extent, the approach worked, culminating in an appearance in the American League Championship Series of 2006. All through the early Oughts, the A’s fielded fun-to-watch teams who won a lot of games, including, of course, a record-breaking twenty-in-a-row in 2002.

No championships, though, and in recent years, the downside of Moneyball has become evident, as injury-prone players get injured, once-great veterans fail to recapture their youth (see Mike Piazza), and the A’s organization seems incapable of drafting and developing its own superstar position players. Although they are still very good at identifying and developing pitchers. No question they know pitching.

Intersection, Oakland

Life & Death & Moneyball

Think of the police as the superstars who make a lot of money, and why shouldn’t they? Pretty hard job they do. Danger every day. Elaborate training required. Lots at stake. (Of course, the current dispute between the City and the police is not over salaries, but over how much the officers organization should pay into its own pension plan. Absent a 9% payment, the City says it can’t afford to hire more officers.)

Non-profits, like YouthAlive!, in Oakland, tend to work where they can find cheap or donated space, often their equipment is old computers, metal desks, flip charts and magic markers, thumb tacks and their own cars. Usually they do get reimbursed for gas.

Diet Rite Cola sign, West Oakand

Training Comes with a Bullet

You might say that non-violence work requires less training than police work. Technically, perhaps.

But training also comes with a bullet.

Working in Oakland programs that deal with the various stages of a life touched by violence, there are victims of drive-by shootings, mothers of the killed, even formerly incarcerated gang members.

Gutierrez & the Kids

Caheri Gutierrez, who lost her face in a drive-by shooting in 2008, works, with her colleague Robert Watts III, in a program called Teens on Target, where high school students in violent Deep East Oakland learn to cope, where they learn how to tell the stories of their lives and their community. These students then go into the middle schools to work with younger kids exposed to violence, to share stories and ideas about coping, about finding solutions other than violence.

The idea is to give these kids an alternative to the path of the gun, to the path many of the adults and many of the older children, in their neighborhoods and families have been taking for decades now. Sometimes it is the only path, and violence the only solution, these young people have seen.

For those who have entered the life already, there is the Measure Y Street Outreach team, led by Kevin Grant, who committed crimes in Oakland and got sent away to Federal prison for 17 years, only to become, in the years since his release, one of the most persuasive and compelling voices of non-violence in California.

Grant and his colleagues take to Oakland’s most dangerous streets at the most dangerous times of the night to engage young people who have the potential to do harm. He approaches them with an insider’s instincts, a gang-veteran’s credibility, and a passion for peace in their lives. When he talks to them about the failure of the life of the gun, he tends to make a lot of sense. They tend to listen to him.

Dan Simmons & the Returned

Some do, anyway. Others don’t hear or don’t heed the message Grant brings. They get arrested, get sent away. Many, probably safe to say most, who return after a period of incarceration are unskilled, uneducated, unwanted. A return to the kind of life that got them into trouble might be the only choice they see.

As part of Oakland’s prisoner re-entry program, city-employee Dan Simmons, a veteran of incarceration, now with a masters degree and a mission, and his colleague Emilio Vann, along with Grant, work to introduce people out on probation or parole to the possibilities of a lawful, peaceful existence.

Simmons works with the OPD and Alameda County Probation and Parole offices to coordinate Call-ins. Call-ins are meetings between, on the one side, the police, the DA, the United States Attorney and other law enforcement organizations and, on the other side, Oaklanders identified by their records and affiliations as most likely to commit violence in their communities.

These meetings, held at City Hall, are business-like and even polite, but very intense.

First, the police and the government attorneys promise vigilance. We are watching you, even the FBI is watching you now: commit more acts of violence, and you will be sent far away for a very long time, we promise.

Then Grant talks to the participants (read about Grant's talk in "It's over, you lost"). He shows that he understands their lives, then helps them imagine a different path, all the while acknowledging the difficulties they face in trying to leave behind the life of the gun.

Then the law enforcement people leave the room, and Simmons invites representatives of local non-profits and local businesses to speak. They offer job training, legal and spiritual aide, actual jobs.

Then case manager Emilio Vann works tenaciously for months to keep the participants on track.

Tammy Cloud & the Shot

Shots are fired anyway. 220-plus shootings so far this year. Last year we had an average of three per day. (See: even I can’t resist the urge to compare years. See, again:,Trauma Cache, Part 1: TheCalendar and the Killing.) On one particular day last year, there were eleven incidents of gunfire reported. Guns are aimed and triggers are pulled and people are wounded. Many survive.

Intervention Specialists like Tammy Cloud, from a program called Caught in the Crossfire, meet the victims, often when they awaken at their hospital bedsides. They do two crucial things: first, they encourage the victims and their friends and family to consider foregoing violent retaliation, to consider breaking the bloody cycle; secondly, they don’t leave. Instead, they work with victims for the long-term, to help them deal with the emotional trauma that comes in the wake of an assault, and to make their way back into a life not dominated by anger, by fear, or by confusion and depression.

Some die. Mostly in East Oakland. But not exclusively. Many die in less-populated but long-besieged West Oakland. Some make it to Highland Hospital before they die. They leave behind in their loved ones an emptiness, something bottomless, an absence of hope, of reason, of whatever current runs through us that urges living and survival.

You might remember a series of jarring billboards, 31 of them, visible off of Highway 580 and all over West Oakland, where Harris lives and where Khadafy was killed. On the billboards, alongside a large picture of her handsome son, who had just graduated from McClymonds High School, blared the stark, confrontational, resonant question: Do You Know Who Killed Me?

For going on eleven years now Harris has spent her days, and often her nights, and sometimes into the early mornings, at homes, at hospitals, at fresh crime scenes, bringing comfort and the very beginnings of healing to the parents, the spouses, the children of homicide victims in Oakland.

I’ve written a lot about the work and impact Miss Marilyn has on lives in Oakland, so I won’t go into great detail here about all she does for the families of the lost, all the practical things, how she provides a clear eye during their time of shock, all the heavy lifting of the spirit, how she comes to them with an example, with the promise that life goes on.

At first glance, the work of Harris and Gutierrez and Cloud, and of Simmons and Grant and Vann seems to speak to a grim reality: hatred and the hopelessness of the gun are part of us. And certainly each of them is a realist. They have seen too much to be otherwise. But what they’ve seen, what they have endured, has not made them cynical. The energy and even joy you often see in them as they work indicates their hope.

For sure each of them works in the moment, the urgent, frightening, depressing moment, but always with an eye to a more peaceful future Oakland. More than any numbers that rise or fall, they carry on their shoulders the despair of the city and demonstrate the real hope we cling to.

If they are less a fiscal burden to the city than the police, they are also undervalued, like a light-hitting first-baseman with a high on-base-percentage. Still, even if the Moneyball approach makes sense for a cash-strapped baseball team trying to win games, I’m not sure it will work for a cash-strapped city trying to save lives and to change lives.

And this worries me too: the best of the A's Moneyball teams were fun to watch, and they won their share of games, but, again, they never won a championship.